Opening the North American charging standard
tesla.com
tesla.com
Now they're trying to declare their own charger as a "standard", after launching a $250 adapter in September to use the actual standard plug?
Also, obligatory Technology Connections video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZOuz_laH9I
It’s wild not just how varied Alex’s interests are, but how he’ll find interest in the most mundane subjects (christmas lamps) and how well and thoroughly he’s able to present them.
But the connector is definitely better, so they may as well open it up in the hopes that people adopt the nicer plug and then they won't have to change it after all. Basically no reason not to given how things are going with CCS1. I certainly think from a usability perspective it would be preferable if "NACS" was the winner. CCS is not a great design.
I'm not convinced of that. Tesla's connector is thinner and lighter yes absolutely. But Tesla is also weaker and less reliable \ less fault tolerant than standard EV charger cables (See the dreaded EP307 / lock error, something that can't even happen with a normal EV CCS charger)
I definitely think it's preferable for CCS win, as it's the safest, most durable, most compatible, while also being the lowest cost option.
Can you share a link to back these claims?
Thinner means more accessible/easier to use. CCS is wholly unreliable if it is even slightly at the wrong angle, which is common due to the bulk of the plug and cable.
But yeah, it's probably a lot of software issues. Strangely I do not hear from Europe that there are problems like here. I don't hear about 'charger is broken or won't charge' in Europe when people use tesla chargers (which are on the euro-ccs standard just like tesla cars there). Can anyone chime in? I'm in the US.
I'm reading the announcement differently. They are saying future non Teslas who adopt NACS can use the Tesla chargers. It doesn't say anything about current CCS cars being able to use Tesla charging.
Even after this move I don't see any way that the Tesla standard gains enough momentum to take over from CCS in the non-Tesla US EV market. If Tesla had done this in 2015 there's a chance it might have caught on globally. With the non-Tesla US EV market locked into CCS and growing rapidly (and Tesla itself already committed to CCS in Europe), it feels like the Tesla standard is doomed. (In fact today's move is actually sort of bad news, since it indicates that maybe Tesla hasn't quite accepted this reality.)
[1] https://electrek.co/2022/05/10/tesla-add-ccs-connectors-supe...
> NACS is the most common charging standard in North America: NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined.
Yet, in your link it's complained about that the Supercharging network capacity is already strained. Bottom line is that the vast majority of the charging stations that will exist 10 years from now are still yet to be built.
Tesla may still be hoping for a regional break, as their standard wins in some geographies but not for others. This would be a loss for all of us all collectively.
Certainly feels like they should have known better. Past greed will leave them (and their customers) with a massive writeoff in the future if your prediction comes to pass.
CCS was released slightly before the Model S (first to use Tesla's connector). Both were developed at the same time. At the time, there was no viable alternative for Tesla. Now, there is no reason to revert to a significantly subpar option.
If Tesla wanted theirs to be standard, they should have made this move years ago. They missed the boat, and are now scrambling to avoid having to change their own sockets.
It's very difficult to find charge stations that aren't Tesla, and when you do, they're often used for general parking.
Where I am (Oregon), public CCS charger locations outnumber Tesla chargers several times over. There are huge areas of the state that have CCS chargers, but no Tesla charging capacity.
My next EV will certainly not be a Tesla, for that reason.
A family friend returned her EV after realizing how dumb the situation is here. Perhaps it's a regional problem.
We're talking about two different things.
You are talking about the count of chargers. Tesla has a higher quantity of chargers, yes. However, their chargers are concentrated; a single charging location has 30+ chargers. This drives their high charger count numbers.
CCS chargers are more geographically widespread. There are more locations with CCS chargers than with Tesla chargers. There are fewer CCS plugs in total, but you're more likely to be close to one.
It's more useful to have one fast-charging location with 3 plugs every 50 miles, than to have 500 fast-chargers next to one another in a single location and then nothing in a 200-mile radius.
If you go to plugshare.com and zoom in to Oregon, you can toggle back and forth between Tesla and CCS. There are very visibly way more discrete places in Oregon that have a CCS charger.
That said, we've so far not had any issues with that in the last two years; while sometimes only a subset of chargers at a location have been working, it's never been zero, and we've rarely had to wait in line.
Maybe we've been lucky. Or maybe Oregon is special. But in the face of reliable chargers, I prefer a smaller, widespread count over larger numbers in a concentrated location.
Also while Plugshare may show more dots on a map, that doesn't correspond to useful charging. Non-Tesla charging stations are notoriously inconvenient, unreliable, and slow to charge. That's why my friend with the e-tron rents a gas car if he wants to go more than a few hundred miles. This is borne out again and again in tests. When MKBHD tested a Tesla and a Mustang Mach-E, the Mach-E itself was fine but the charging infrastructure was unreliable.[1] The Mustang was delayed over 6 hours due to bad charging.
I've put almost 30,000 miles on my car and I've never had an issue with a supercharger. You just plug in and it charges. You don't need to install any apps or enter your credit card info. And if for some crazy reason I can't use a supercharger, I have adapters for the other connectors.
If you want the electric vehicle that can charge in the most places, get a Tesla.
All my arguments are geographically based. In Oregon, this is not the case. In the last three years, I've never pulled up to a CCS charger and had all chargers be out of service or sub-50kw. Rarely have I ever had to wait in line for such a charger. As no adapter is necessary, I consider this superior to Tesla. There are towns we frequent on the Oregon coast that are far from any Tesla chargers, but are dotted with CCS chargers. When my friend comes with us and brings his Model 3, he has to take at least one detour that's over a half hour each way so that he can charge for the trip home. We do not have to do this.
Adapters are a good stopgap but not everyone has one, because they're somehow not stock with the car.
I think even they've dropped it for future stuff tho.
The Leaf is the only model in the U.S. that uses, or has ever used, the CHAdeMO connection that the Leaf has. Good luck finding a CHAdeMO charger now, it was already hard 4 years ago and it is just getting worse. Most places that had one were Nissan dealerships, but those are almost always broken now. Nissan dealers just don't care about it. Even when they exist and are working, that has to be the most difficult connector I've ever seen for a consumer-grade product.
Their 40kW battery base model costs as much as a 60kW Chevy Bolt. Where I live, 40kW will get you only ~120 miles of range. That small of a battery also can't charge that fast.
The most damning thing of all though is that the Nissan Leaf is the only EV sold today that doesn't use active cooling on their battery pack. It was a horrible oversight on the Gen1 Leaf, but it is absurd for the Gen2 after most of those Gen1 batteries cooked themselves to death (and were eventually replaced after a class-action lawsuit).
That's mostly true, but there is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV which still uses it.
The vast majority of EVs in the United States use this now, and it's not just historical - Just to emphasis the most popular EV cars in the US today are:
Tesla Model Y 60,271 20% 191,451 50.7% 33.2% Tesla Model 3 55,030 67% 156,357 94.5% 27.1% Ford Mustang Mach-E 10,414 – 28,089 49% 4.9% Tesla Model S 9,171 150% 23,464 79.9% 4.1% Chevy Bolt EV/EUV 14,709 226% 22,012 -11.3% 3.8% Hyundai IONIQ 5 4,800 – 18,492 – 3.2% Tesla Model X 6,552 43% 19,542 16.4% 3.4%
My bet is that within two years Tesla standardizes on CCS for its US cars (thus getting rid of an annoying upgrade/adapter/retrofit problem) and then what'll be left is the sad minority (AKA me) who are stuck with the dying standard and an annoying dongle.
Who is going to pay for this? If it's Tesla, then the smart move is to put CCS into cars right now (and as a side benefit, standardize their US and European models [edit: nevermind this bit, not the same standards].) If it's the customer, then it's an annoying non-trivial cost you'll have to bear. Yuck.
But it doesn't matter. The number of vehicles taken either way is negligible. In the old days, you had to change the miles/km speedometer to the other one when you took you car with you as you emigrated. Buying a charge adapter is easier.
Single phase vs three phase is the big reason for a difference between US and EU charger plugs though. Three phase is pretty uncommon in residential areas in the US but is common in many EU countries. Industrial customers in the US will often have three phase but it's pretty rare to see outside of that.
In the US:
There are 36000 individual tesla connections
There are 92000 l2 j1772 ports.
There are 22000 CCS DC fast ports
They are comparing the DC fast number to the tesla number, and ignoring the j1772 number.
1. All the other cars are J1772 + CCS
2. So you'd have to provide adapters for every other non-tesla car, or replace every non-tesla port. Not just the 20k CCS ones, but the 96K J1772 ones.
3. They are claiming a false ubiquity to make it seem like now is a good time to do this. The point at which there are 3x other plugs than yours is not a point where others are going to switch to your thing.
In fact, they are almost certainly doing it because they see the train coming at them, and don't want to deal with it.
It's too late.
For reference here is the DOT's NPRM from June laying out the proposed requirements for states to receive federal funds from the infrastructure package: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/06/22/2022-12...
> NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined.
This suggests to me it’s not Tesla that’s late. If anything is a society-wide EV standard in North America, it’s the Tesla plug.
Even if competitors decide to use the Tesla standard, it'll be a few years before they ship it. By then, Tesla's current 66% share of deployed vehicles will almost certainly have dropped to less than 50%.
Also, Musk said they're opening up superchargers to CCS soon, so car buyers like me don't think the Tesla connector is a differentiator any more.
Having said that, I have a CCS car, and charge station availability is totally fine, at least in the parts of California where superchargers exist.
It has nowhere to go but now, and is almost certainly dropping fast.
The number is also a feint.
It's true that NACS outnumbers CCS, but that's because they are only comparing fast-charging spots, which they outnumber.
If you included the J1772 part, tesla is outnumbered at this point in the US.
Going by ports (because that's what tesla is counting in their numbers).
There are ~92000 public level 2 ports (not chargers) in the US. That does not include the DC fast charging ports. There are about 20k of these.
There are 35,000 tesla ports (which tracks, since this is 60% more than 20k) For tesla, there is no difference between dc fast charging and non ports.
So the number cited is, as per usual for tesla, misleading, since it ignores the level 2 ports that are commonly used. There are 2.5x more of those, and combined with CCS, there are 3x more ports total than tesla's standard.
I like the connector for sure, but it's way too late.
Tesla is claiming that now is a good time to move to NACS because they already have 60% more NACS ports than CCS.
But this is not really right, because all those cars/charge stations also have J1772 connectors they are using and would no longer work.
So
1. Tesla is a lot less ubiquitous than they are claiming. J1772 + CCS is far more ubiquitous - by a factor of 3x.
2. You'd either have to retrofit or use adapters for all the J1772 stations as well (Yes, tesla ships an adapter, i know).
3. Nobody is going to do that.
Maybe 5-6 years ago, it was true, but it's definitely not true anymore.
I can't even remember the last time i hit a non-working non-tesla charger on a road trip or locally
For those who don't know there are two charging connecters used for new electric cars in the US: Tesla (now called NACS and only used on Teslas) and CCS (used by everyone else). There's nothing here to indicate that that's changing and it feels like a move by Tesla to try turning around the momentum in a format war they're losing, even if they have a wider installed base today
Previously the only public info was their patent filings.
It also sounds like they are offering specific parts (inlets and connector cables) for sale since they are providing datasheets on them.
The connector patents were on that list but that wasn’t a real spec.
But it doesn't matter, they could give everyone who asks a 20 year license for $1.
Also courts aren't stupid.
> we are opening our EV connector design to the world. We invite charging network operators and vehicle manufacturers to put the Tesla charging connector ... equipment and vehicles
This does not even promise that it is free. "open" and "invite you to X" sound good but are very vague.
None. There would have to be a governing body set up for this to have any legs
It has two big power pins, one smaller pin dedicated to ground, and two tiny pins that look completely unsuited for power.
There's a "mobile connector" that can convert 3 phase, but that has an entirely different plug on the wall side.
Hence why they are calling this the "North American charging standard."
We are still within bounds of choosing the superior connector. It isn't too late like in Europe, especially since US bound vehicles are already using a different plug than their European counterparts
The major auto manufactures are on track to have 60% of all new cars EVs by 2026. Tesla just can't compete with that volume. They need to start getting ready for the new standard now, not pulling this nonsense.
Only by strict volume of cars on the road. Looking at manufacturers and models, they are just a tiny fraction of the market. And judging from how fast their market share is slipping, we're probably only a year or so from them being in the strict minority by any metric.
It's just a connector. Why did CCS have to be twice as big then? What's the tradeoff CCS took?
Edit: I just looked up a size comparison of CCS vs Tesla/NACS and what the heck happened...
It would have been like USB-C being glued to the top of an old SCSI connector.
Tesla controlled both ends (literally) on theirs and so they could optimize for size/etc.
TLDR CCS wanted to be backwards compatible, while Tesla planned fast charging to be first class with their standard. At the time, no one was doing fast charging at Supercharger currents (150kw). CCS was bolted on to J1772.
1. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
CCS isn't the absolute smallest way to add two more huge pins, but it's pretty close.
Then supporting the old cars just happens with a dongle.
- Backward compatibility: CCS is backward-compatible extension of J plug, and can't share AC and DC lines due to that.
- Higher safety margins in CCS
- CCS design by committee
- Better engineers at Tesla
At least in theory, it should be possible to make it mechanically stronger than a smaller connector.
I've heard of charge station cable connectors failing do repeated bending stress, and my car has multiple warning stickers saying not to plug into a charging cable that is under tension.
Is it? I can go to a 350kW charger with CCS1. What's the max for a supercharger? 250kW?
You are probably thinking of the megawatt charger for the semi, which is different.
A regular V3 supercharger caps out at 250kW. There are rumors that the V4 might get closer to 400kW, but as far as I know those remain rumors. There's also a rumor of an upgrade of V3 superchargers to about 325kW, which would at least be getting close to CCS1.
I expect licensing terms to be announced, and I bet you large users will have to pay.
While I expect car manufacturers would want to negotiate a custom patent license, others interesting in using the patents (like say EVSE manufacturers) could technically just utilize the Tesla patent pledge.
Of course if they do so they cannot later sue Tesla for any form of IP infringement, without getting countersued over the patents. Thus if you use tesla's patents under the license, you can sue them for copyright, patent, trademark, trade-secret or any other right, without getting countersued. This would mean Tesla could openly make full blown counterfeits of your companies products, and you cannot sue them without getting countersued for patent violation. So I'm doubting terribly many will want to take up this offer, but they technically could.
The spec being open put up on a website does practically nothing. Patent's are public and it'd be trivial to reverse engineer a charging standard anyway.
I hope Ford and other EV Manufacturers make retrofit kits though - and similar for the charging stations already deployed. Lugging an adapter for all non-Tesla EVs before the, what, 2024 model year would be irritating. Assuming, of course, they are on board and this doesn't turn into Betamax/VHS, Blu-ray/HD-DVD, or HDR10+/Dolby Vision again.
Honestly this feels more like a desperate attempt by Tesla to push back on the trend towards CCS instead of a substantive announcement
I for one am fine with it. The "NACS" is objectively better by almost every available measure, and if the despised Elon Musk wants to give his stuff away, hey I'll take it. Any good reasons why we should reject this proposal?
Waaaaaay too late for that. It'd be like Apple telling that they'll open the Lightning connector and that other phone manufacturers should switch to it, if Apple had done that in like 2019.
Sure, nice try, but maybe you should've taken this position about a decade earlier.
No idea here. The 1 MW charging claim feels weird since faster charging was definitely a touted benefit of CCS in the recent past. I'm not sure if something changed.
To me, it doesn't really matter one way or another. The CCS connector is bulky, but so is a gas station nozzle and I've never had a problem using one of those. Plus you'll use the CCS connector less often since most charging is done at home with a connector comparable to the NACS one. I'd probably lean towards CCS because it's effectively the same as international standards, it's already the standard, and separating the AC and DC pins probably simplifies engineering on the car side but I don't actually care as long as we all use one connector with an open spec.
Not sure how you’re defining “standard” but given that Tesla has the major majority here, its connector is the standard most people are familiar with.
If you just mean, it’s something not proprietary that other manufacturers agreed on, then sure.
You can't reasonably say that e.g. USB is a standard and CCS is not
>You can't reasonably say that e.g. USB is a standard and CCS is not
CCS is “a standard” but Tesla is “the standard” from a consumer perspective.
The same thing happened with apple lightning early on. It was far better and dominated micro usb. If they had opened it early during usb-c it would have just killed usb-c and been the new standard.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:J1772_(CCS1).svg
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IEC_62196_Type_2_(M,_DC,_...
This is probably too little, too late for Tesla.
Though if most of the bulk/plug is on the charger side, than this is all a non-issue.
Also, their order backlog is dropping, even though we are in the middle of a gasoline crisis, and all (?) other EV manufacturers are seeing unprecedented demand. This suggests current factories can meet Tesla's future steady state demand, so ramping will only help a bit:
https://insideevs.com/news/615583/estimated-tesla-order-back...
I think the root cause is that they only have a few models, especially compared to the combined model lines of their competition.
Also, many people on the coasts are uncomfortable supporting Musk, thanks to the Twitter thing and Tesla labor violations. For that crowd, Tesla may as well be welding truck balls to their back bumpers.
As much as I've grown to dislike Musk I'd rather like to see Tesla succeed. By gutting Tesla senior management as well as rank and file Musk is ensuring Tesla's market share is only headed in one direction: down.
A bunch of far behind EV manufacturers settling on an inferior connector doesn’t mean much. Tesla and its connector is exactly akin to Sony and Blu-ray, except Tesla is further ahead and won’t be charging licensing.
Everyone in North America that isn't Tesla: CCS1
Telsa in North America: NACS
Everyone including Tesla in Europe: CCS2
Everyone in Japan: CHAdeMO
Everyone in China: GB/T
And CHAdeMO just seems bad compared to the competition.
If you exclude those it becomes a lot simpler.
I don’t think there is that much benefit in a global standard given that adapters exist.
I'm not sure how 3-phase fits in, but it didn't prevent being at least as useful as in the U.S.
The proprietary part was they did pin switching to enable the same connector to do DC Supercharging as well.
Now they have switched to CCS Type 2 in Europe which is the Type 2 connector plus additional pins for DC charging and the CCS communication protocols.
Only Tesla owners say this. Owners of all other EVs literally don't care - except as much as they care that every other non-Tesla charger uses CCS.
They care about not having to worry about which charging station to use, not the shape of the plug.
On speed, CCS supports faster charging than an Supercharger built to date so if you had a bad experience with charging speed it was the car or charger, not CCS